Though Jonathan Liew is a Guardian sports writer, editors have allowed him to opine on issues he clearly knows nothing about: Palestinians, Israel, and antisemitism – a privilege gifted to Liew by editors to go outside his lane that, tellingly, wasn’t granted to long-time Jewish columnist Hadley Freeman, who left the outlet in part because they wouldn’t let her publish pieces on post-Oct. 7 antisemitism.
In 2022, Liew penned a column accusing Israel of “sports washing”.
In Nov. 2024, he published a piece titled “Sport may be a blunt tool of social change, but it’s time to take a stand against Israel”, which patted himself on the back for being brave by alleging that “almost two million people in Gaza are at risk of starving to death”. This libel is so egregious and so completely divorced from reality, that we were unable to find this charge leveled at even the most propagandistic anti-Israel sites.
A few months ago, he engaged in Amsterdam pogrom revisionism by framing the 2024 Jew-hunt by local, largely Arab and Muslim mobs targeting Maccabi Tel Aviv fans as a story about “Maccabi’s football hooligans”.
In that same article, Liew defended the original police decision to ban the same team’s fans from attending a game at Aston Villa that was so discredited – and motivated by antisemitism – that the West Midland’s police chief was forced to resign, and a Parliamentary Report published detailing the myriad of flaws in the decision-making process.
Liew’s latest effort at whitewashing antisemitism, while effectively blaming Jews for provoking those targeting their community, focused on a Gail’s Bakery branch in Archway, north London.
The piece (“A corner of north London where food has become a battleground in the Israel-Gaza war”, March 14) castigated Gail’s, which has been besieged by antizionist activists due largely to it having once been owned by Israeli Jews, for engaging in “an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression” by opening a branch near a Palestinian cafe.
Though Gail’s has repeatedly been vandalised with smashed windows and antizionist messages in what the chief executive of the UK business describes as an “intimidation” campaign, Liew tries to garner sympathy for the “pro-Palestinian activists” by contrasting the ‘aggressive’ chain – which vandals have labeled “corporate Zionism” – with the nearby Palestinian-owned Cafe Metro.
As you can see, the strap-line itself, echoing Liew’s words in the article, right above a photo of Cafe Metro’s owners, defends the acts of intimidation against Gail’s, that Met Police are investigating as hate crimes, as understandable acts of “petty symbolism”.
The cafe has been frequented by Jeremy Corbyn, and has partnered with the Islington branch of the Palestine Solidary Campaign (PSC). PSC, let’s remember, applied for permission for the first anti-Israel protest in London on 7th October 2023 – that is, while Hamas was still slaughtering Jews in southern Israel. PSC also issued a statement two days later effectively excusing Hamas’s massacre.
Liew begins his piece praising the Palestinian cuisine at the cafe, before framing the cafe as an act of resistance, an affirmation of “Palestinian identity that Israel’s bombs and snipers are so intent on erasing”. He then introduces one of the new “predators” in the neighborhood, the “new branch of the upmarket bakery, Gail’s”.
He bizarrely opines that Cafe Metro and Gail’s Bakery “have found themselves on the frontline of a war”, which, he adds, is a “deeply asymmetric war, defined by gross imbalances in power and resources and platforms”. This is an awkward attempt by the sports writer to superimpose the Guardian narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto two London eateries, when it’s of course only the antizionist extremists who have brought the war to a purveyor of coffee and baked goods.
There’s also one argument later in the piece that’s, even by Guardian standards, an astonishing inversion of reality. Liew writes that, “in the current oppressive climate, even to exist as a Palestinian in western society is to be the target of aggression and suspicion, to be tainted as a murderer and an antisemite, even if your ambitions stretch little further than cooking food and serving coffee”.
In fact, in the week prior to Liew’s piece, a well-armed Lebanese man whose brothers are Hezbollah terrorists rammed his vehicle into a Michigan synagogue that had a Jewish day care center with 140 children inside; In Amsterdam, an explosive device detonated outside a Jewish school; In Rotterdam, there was an explosion at a Jewish school; In the eastern Belgian city of Liege, there was an explosion outside of a synagogue; Two more Toronto synagogues were hit with gunfire on Shabbat, making three struck since the end of February; In Trondheim, Norway, police arrested a man for suspicious behavior outside a synagogue – an incident that followed a week in which three people were arrested outside Oslo Synagogue for carrying illegal firearms and explosives.
Moreover, since Oct. 7, Jewish or Israeli owned restaurants and cafes in the US and UK – Jews, in Liew’s words, whose “ambitions stretch little further than cooking food and serving coffee” – been frequent targets of boycotts, vandalism and hate.
It has been Jews in the West – not Palestinians – who, since Oct. 7th, the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, have disproportionately been “the target of aggression and suspicion”.
Finally, Liew reaches the conclusion that, in the noble effort to rid the UK of all Zionist influence, all’s fair:
Does any of this move the dial in the occupied territories even one iota? Almost certainly not. But perhaps this is simply the nature of an increasingly disenfranchised age. Palestinian activism has arguably never been less capable of exerting a meaningful influence on global events, and so is increasingly defined by small acts of petty symbolism. A smashed window. A provocative sticker. You can’t lay a glove on the US-Israeli military-industrial complex, and you can’t get your local council to boycott Israeli goods, and you couldn’t stand with Palestine Action and the protest march on Sunday has been banned by the Metropolitan police. So some people then direct their ire at the bakery with distant links to Israeli security funding.
First, what he described as a “protest march on Sunday” which was “banned by the Metropolitan police” was the Iranian-regime sponsored al-Quds Day march, established by Ayatollah Khomeini just 7 months after the 1979 revolution. As such, those attending the march yesterday, despite it being banned, could be heard chanting “death to Israel” and “death to the United States”.
Moreover, Liew’s “What choice do they have?” defence of hate crimes targeting a London business is, of course, a popular refrain used by those – such as PSC and most major pro-Palestinian activist groups – who’ve defended, to varying degrees of explicitness, terrorist violence targeting Israel.
Even leaving aside how ludicrous it is to claim that the pro-Palestinian movement, which, since the Hamas massacre, has held countless rallies in the UK, some of which drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, is “disenfranchised”, his defence of illegal acts of vandalism which serve to further intimidate a tiny, beleaguered Jewish community which has faced a tsunami of antisemitism over the last two and a half years is, even by Guardian standards, truly despicable.
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